The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (11 page)

‘It looked awful. They were still building it.’

The girls were taken first into the accommodation, one of two parallel rows of large wooden huts, known as ‘cabins’, each housing around fifty Wrens sleeping in bunk beds. Each of
these ‘cabins’ housed a complete shift or ‘watch’ of Wrens. They were built close together with water and sewage pipes running down the gap between the two rows. Each row
had a central corridor linking the series of huts and at each end of each hut was a ‘single cabin’ for the petty officer in charge of the watch. The huts were all named after famous
warships. Colette’s was HMS
Orion
, after one of the ships which defeated the French at the Battle of Trafalgar, still regarded as the Royal Navy’s most glorious victory.
Colette was beginning to wonder if she’d made the right decision.

‘Someone had said to us, this is Pembroke Five. You’ll never get out of it. You’ll be here ’til the end of the war, unless you drop dead. We had to put the bunks up. We
had to put them together and we were scrubbing and cleaning the hut and the corridor and then finally we were taken to Block B where the Bombes were, and introduced to them.’

Pembroke Five was the unit name for all the Wrens working for Bletchley wherever they were based. The Bombes were huge, bronze machines more than six
foot high, seven foot
wide and two and a half foot deep (1.8m x 2.1m x 0.8m) set in rows of three, with a dozen Bombes, sometimes more, in each of the rooms or ‘bays’. The new Wrens were told that they would
be helping to break the German codes and that the Bombes were checking for possible settings. Each Bombe contained thirty rotating drums, every one of them replicating the action of an individual
Enigma rotor. The girls had to load the drums and wire them up at the back according to instructions on the ‘menu’ they were given. The wires had plugs on them which Colette and the
other Wrens plugged into sockets alongside the drums.

‘We were shown how to plug up the back. It was very complicated, it really was. It took some learning. The drums went round at different revolutions. I can remember the noise,
clackety-clackety-clackety-clack, and having your sleeves rolled up, working hard and so much stretching. They said they wanted girls not less than five foot eight inches. I was five foot eight and
a half tall and even I had to stretch. It was very noisy – the clackety-clack sound. Filthy mess and stench, hot black oil dripping onto the floor.’

They worked in pairs, one of them plugging up the Bombe and the other sitting beside the Bombe at a machine designed to replicate the action of Enigma, checking the results to see if they
produced German language. Colette always did the plugging up, following a ‘menu’ worked out at Bletchley on the basis of a piece of German text the codebreakers thought might be
somewhere in a particular encoded message.

‘You’d put the drums up, and then go around the back
and plug them up according to the menu. The menu was brought in to us. We had a Wren petty officer in
charge of us and she would hand out the menus.’

Once it was set up, the Bombe would be switched on and go through its cycle with the drums turning round, taking just under a quarter of an hour to find the first possible setting for a string
of encoded letters that would fit the menu devised by Bletchley.

‘When the whole thing stopped we would take the reading from the side of the Bombe and that would go in to the girls who were doing the checking. I remember the joy of hearing the shout
“job up” from the checking room, which meant that the “stop” that you’d got made sense and gave them the words they were looking for and would be bunged through on the
scrambler phone to Bletchley.’

There were a lot of ‘bad’ stops where the checkers found the settings the Bombe had thrown up didn’t work. This was usually because the little wire brushes in the back of each
of the drums had got too close together and the electricity had ‘shorted’ across between the brushes, making a false connection.

‘There were little metal brushes inside the drums and they could come together and cause a short. If it was a “bad stop” we knew there was a short somewhere and that meant we
had to take all the drums out and move the brushes. We used to spend all the time while the thing was running with a pair of tweezers going over these brushes on the other drums.’

When the job was up, they always felt a bit of pride that what they were doing might have helped somehow. When
they were working on an actual job they were told which of
the German armed forces the code belonged to. They used codewords to identify whether it was a navy, army or air force message: porpoise for the navy, wolf for the army and eagle for the air force.
When each job was finished, the chief petty officer in charge of the watch would shout, ‘Job up. Strip.’ As the person setting up the Bombe, it was Colette’s job then to unplug
the wiring and take out all of the drums as quickly as possible ready for the next menu.

‘I do remember it was very hard work and there was a real sense that you were doing something important. It was a strange time, difficult to replicate really, everyone living on a knife
edge. We were very well aware that we had to win the war or else. What was going to happen to us was going to be worse than anything that had been seen on the continent. There was an air of urgency
about things.’

Anne Zuppinger was nineteen when she arrived at Bletchley in early 1941, in the first batch of Wrens. Her father was a corn merchant in London, a business he’d inherited
from his father, a Swiss national who’d come to London in the late 1870s and married a local woman. Despite her young age, Anne was spotted early on as someone capable of carrying
responsibility and earmarked as a potential officer. She understood the importance of the work and the need for total secrecy. So when Commander Denniston complained that the Wren training bases
were sending them the wrong type of girls she was commissioned and sent out to the training bases to select the type of people needed by Bletchley and its outstations.

The training staff at Mill Hill, Headingley and Tullichewan made an initial selection on the basis that the Wrens sent to Bletchley had to have a good education, but they
also had to be someone who wasn’t going to be a security risk. They had to be dependable and prepared to do what could at times be an extremely boring job knowing that it was important to the
country. They also needed to be a certain height, because the Bombe machines were quite tall, and they had to be fit and have extremely good eyesight. All this might seem easy to determine but the
staff at the training bases advising the Wrens on the various jobs they could do had no idea what was going on at Bletchley, which made it difficult for them to know who would be best for the job.
Anne had operated the Bombes, learning how to do it from scratch. She knew the people doing it – who was good and who was not so good. She would have a much better idea than the training
staff of which Wrens to select.

‘I was working with the Bombes and therefore knew exactly what was needed, whereas they had people recruiting from the various training centres who didn’t know what the girls were
required to do.’

Initially, Anne was just looking for people capable of working on the Bombes, but soon she was also selecting Wrens to work in the Naval Section in Hut 4 and in other roles, including working
inside Hut 6. Amid concern that the Wrens were not getting the status their role deserved, all Wrens working for Bletchley whether on the Bombes or in other areas were given the intriguing job
title of ‘Writer Special Duties (X)’.

‘When I went up to interview them, I used to try to make quite sure that the person that I was seeing would realise that this was a very vital job they were doing but
also that it was going to be something that they would not be able to talk about at all.’

The extent of the secrecy at the time is difficult to imagine in today’s world. Audrey Wind, from Folkestone in Kent, was only eighteen when she was picked out by Anne to operate the
Bombes. A week after arriving at Tullichewan in the early summer of 1944, she and five other trainees were told to report to the administrative offices in the actual castle.

‘We racked our brains to think what we had done wrong but could think of nothing.’

They were ordered to sit quietly outside the office and wait. They would be seen in alphabetical order. So the girls agreed among themselves that the first who went in would come out and tell
the others what it was about.

‘The first Wren was called in and we waited with bated breath for her to come out and tell us what we were there for. But when the door opened she marched straight past us and out of the
castle.’

The other five wondered what on earth was going on, but as each of them went in to be briefed by Anne, they came out obeying her instructions that they must not discuss it with anyone else.
Audrey was fifth to go in (there was a girl behind her whose surname was Wright). Anne told her only that there was some very secret work to do that was vitally important if they were going to win
the war. She couldn’t be told what the actual work was until she’d
agreed to do it. In the meantime, she mustn’t say anything about it to anyone else.

‘I was then told “About turn” and marched out of the room, straight past poor Wren Wright.’

Anne heard about the girls’ consternation later and laughed. So far as she was concerned it simply showed that she’d made the right choices when she selected those particular Wrens.
They were told not to talk about it and they didn’t, and all of them agreed to take the job. Anne never stopped drumming in the secrecy aspect, which was repeatedly stressed when the girls
were in their various ‘Wrenneries’ doing the job.

‘One managed to get across that this was a very vital thing and I would always tell them that it was secret work, it was something that was absolutely essential to the war effort, that it
was exceedingly boring. But if they were keen to do something for the good of the country, and if that’s what they’d joined up for, well then maybe this was the job for them.’

Once they arrived at the outstation and began working on the Bombes they were told that their work was vital to helping the codebreakers read the German messages. Occasionally Anne or one of the
other officers would brief them on the various triumphs resulting from their work, especially if they had helped the navy.

‘We had to be quite sure that their morale was kept up because it was tedious work, very tedious work, and one way was to let them know some of the intelligence that came out of the work
they were doing, so that they would realise that it was an absolute priority. I know that
when we finally managed to get
Bismarck
, that was one of our triumphs and
they were told about that. They were also told how important it was that we knew where the submarines were in the Atlantic because our food supply was coming across the Atlantic and that was our
lifeline, and so it was very vital that we should break the submarines’ codes.’

Anne made sure her girls realised that while there were many brilliant people at Bletchley breaking the codes, they couldn’t do it without all sorts of other people, particularly the
operators intercepting the messages – some of whom were themselves Wrens – and the women operating the Bombes.

‘One had many of the tremendous brains in Bletchley Park, but they relied totally on the Wrens to carry out the work they’d done and it wouldn’t have been possible to break
these codes unless they had Wrens operating the machines.’

The Wrens came from all walks of life, from debs to ordinary working-class girls. One of the Wrens working on Colette’s watch was Lady Camilla Wallop, who went on to become a
lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II but was known as plain Wren Wallop.

In their time off, Colette and her friends would read or go to the cinema, and since the food was particularly bad at Eastcote, they would visit the local NAAFI restaurant at nearby Ruislip
where they could buy beans on toast for fourpence (less than 2p). When they were working days or night shifts they would go into London on the underground, queuing up in Trafalgar Square to buy
cheap
forces theatre tickets. Roma Davies, at the time lowly Wren Stenning, loved those trips into London from Eastcote.

‘We took ourselves out for suppers, to the cinema, and even trips to the West End. It was one shilling and threepence [just over 6p] to spend the entire evening at the Variety Club
watching top comedians, singers and dancers. Going into little old cafés and having beans on toast and . . . when you were in uniform people gave you things, the odd meal, or the conductor
might let you have a free ride on the bus.’

London was dangerous though. When Colette and Sheila Tong were drafted to Eastcote at the end of 1943, the ‘mini-Blitz’ was taking place with the German air force firebombing the
major cities, and the Wrens were often warned not to venture into the centre of London.

Not that they were much safer in Eastcote. One night, a German bomber dropped a ‘Molotov Breadbasket’, a rack containing 820 firebombs, on the ‘cabin’ in which Sheila and
Colette were sleeping. The air-raid siren had gone off but they never went to the shelters.

‘We heard an aircraft overhead. We knew it was a German aircraft. You could always tell from the “whoom, whoom, whoom” sound. All of a sudden it seemed quite low and Sheila
said to me, “Let’s get under the bedclothes.” As if that would help! If you can’t see it, you’re safe!’

Suddenly there was a huge crashing noise and the Molotov Breadbasket came through the roof and destroyed the side of HMS
Orion
, hitting the water pipes that ran down between the
huts.

‘There was the most awful bang and a crash and wallop
and I could feel the central part of the hut was coming in. Then there was absolute silence and the sound of
water pouring in. It was like one of those wartime films of ships being torpedoed with the sea rushing in.’

One of the girls broke the silence, shouting: ‘Abandon ship.’ There was nervous laughter from some of the girls but it shook them out of the shock and made them realise they had to
move. The incendiary bombs hadn’t gone off but they might at any minute. Colette grabbed her gas mask, largely because her secret store of chocolate was hidden inside its case.